Stockholm airport paralysed as snow storm strikes Sweden | Reuters

Dec 5 (Reuters) - Sweden's main airport was paralysed on Wednesday due to a snow storm in the country's capital, just as winners of this year's Nobel prizes were to arrive to receive their awards.

Doha: It’s the end of the world as we know it | Rob Lyons | spiked

It’s like a fly banging its head against a window pane, desperately trying to get to the other side and uncomprehending as to why it never succeeds. Except this is a 17,000-strong swarm of flies taking part in its annual exercise in futility. Yes, there’s another UN climate conference going on, though you might well have missed it.

...And so the process has trundled on in its own, other-worldly way. COP18 sees thousands of the kind of people who think we’re screwing up the planet by flying around the world, flying around the world in order achieve bugger all in a country, Qatar, made rich by the very fossil fuels the delegates want left in the ground. It’s like an absurdist flash mob.

A fanatical and self-righteous green religion stalks Britain. Now it wants to evangelise the Third World – Telegraph Blogs

Charles Dickens must be turning in his grave. We have a government that tells struggling families here at home to buck up and shell out to build wind farms in the developing world. Here, there are mothers worrying about stretching a very limited budget to cover Christmas lunch, with turkey and trimmings, and presents that don't all come from PoundLand; but the Coalition doesn't worry about the hardships under its nose, concentrating instead on those who suffer in distant lands. Dickens would have recognised this instantly as Mrs Jellaby charity – the mother in Bleak House who is obsessed with charitable work for the missions, while her own brood is starving in her kitchen.

How did this tragicomic state of affairs come to pass? The Tories (some of them at least) got not God but Green.

George Osborne's dash for gas may lead to 40 new power stations | Mail Online

Up to 40 gas-fired power stations could be built in the next two decades if George Osborne defies demands to expand green energy.

The Chancellor will today unveil plans for a ‘dash for gas’, which he sees as the cheapest source of future energy and a way to keep household fuel bills affordable.

He will also give the go-ahead for shale gas exploration using the controversial technique of fracking – cracking open rock by pumping in water and chemicals.